We were greeted by a new guide and driver. The guide is very eager to please and friendly, but his English is much more poor than Lee's, which was surprisingly excellent. We drove two and a half hours south, to our next destination, Ninh Binh.
About fifteen minutes away from our hotel, we stopped to view some local temples. Not much to see, but still beautiful.
Soon after, we arrived at our hotel. This was the only hotel of our Vietnam trip that I was allowed to personally choose. I had asked for specific hotels in both Hoi An and Phong Nha as well, but the group I booked through were unable to make arrangements with those places.
We drove up to the hotel, which is a series of cabins, with a main building as a reception desk and a nearby building that housed the restaurant. It is feet away from a staircase that climbs up to one of the nearby mountains, which is why I chose this location. The view did not disappoint.
After checking in, we ate lunch at the hotel's restaurant. The view was incredible.
Back at the room, we settled in. Stephanie came upon a massive spider, tarantula style, in the bathroom. She took it out, using one of the coffee cups in the room.
A few minutes later, we went to open the door, and it was sitting there, right outside the door. She put the spider back into the cup, and we brought it to the other side of grounds.
After a bit of relaxing, we decided to climb the mountain. We tried to time it to be around sunset, but the hotel receptionist advised us of a time that ended up being too early. There were two peaks. We did both. We saw a few mountain goats up there, which is something that I am not used to seeing. I couldn't understand how they could possibly have climbed to some of the areas that they have. Stephanie said something about their feet. I still think they are going to fall. Someone is going to be walking, and a goat will fall past them, off the mountain.
At night, it began storming outside. This was not a typical storm. It was a massive downpour and flooding outside. We picked the next movie on our alphabetized list, in order. It happened to be a horror movie. It was terrible. About five minutes before the end of the movie, there was a jump scare. Stephanie screamed. The alarm that I didn't know existed, on the safe in the room, went off. We had not used the safe, and I am not sure why it went off or if it was even possible for someone's scream to set it off. In any case, it wouldn't stop, and it was super loud. I tried dialing both 0 and 9 on the phone, to reach reception, but neither would connect us.
I put on my waterproof shoes and took one of my umbrellas and headed toward the reception building. The path directly to the reception building was completely flooded. The front of our cabin lets out into a large pond, so I had to go all the way around it in order to reach the reception. It was very dark and there are only a handful of cabins here. While dodging in and out of the huge pooling puddles, I couldn't help but think about how what I was doing was similar to what people do in horror movies. When I reached the reception building, Stephanie was standing there. The safe had, at least momentarily, shut off, and she wanted to let me know. She put on the room's free slippers and walked through the water that had blocked me, so she had arrived before I had.
The reception desk was unoccupied, electronics had been removed from the center, and there was a huge puddle on it. Water had been dripping from a few small leaks in the ceiling. It was just two of us there, with a flooded desk. The lights were on at least, but it was still creepy. We went behind the curtain and called out a few times. After a while, someone came down and helped us out.
We went to bed.
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